Shakhnazarov is otherwise a nostalgist with a particular attraction to the October Revolution and its precursor skirmishes, and a wry attitude toward life under the Soviet umbrella. JAZZMEN (1983; December 3 at 8 pm), in fact, exhibits a degree of satirical wiggle room — pre-glasnost — that can upend Western notions of Soviet cultural oppression. As broad and obvious and high-spirited as a Keystone Cops comedy, the film follows the rather formulaic travails of a young band of eager jazz musicians in the '30s who're surrounded by official culture (scaldingly mocked) that dubs them as decadent and Western but who eventually play Dixielandish bebop to huge audiences. From the Khrushchev thaw onward, the cinematic vision we get of Russian urban life has often been not so radically different from that in France or Sweden, but Jazzmen is a safe look backward compared with COURIER (1987; December 5 at 6 pm), which plants its feet in the late-perestroika present. Something of a generational touchstone that strove to speak for Russian youth just as the empire was crumbling, Shakhnazarov's movie — a coming-of-age teen saga in which an impetuous 18-year-old (Fyodor Dunaevsky) takes a job as a messenger, half-heartedly woos the beautiful daughter (Anastasia Nemolyaeva) of a famous writer, and generally pisses everyone off — is often awkward and unconvincing, but it also seethes with youthful ire. Not unlike Vasili Pichul's Little Vera (1988), Courier is less about crafting a narrative than about nailing down the discombobulated historical moment, from the cynical stance of teenagers fed up with the adult sphere's fuck-ups.

After Zero City, Shakhnazarov veered into the past, first with THE TSAR'S ASSASSIN (1993; December 5 at 7:45 pm), a supremely odd fable in which a contemporary mental patient (an entirely redubbed Malcolm McDowell) believes he is the Communist assassin of both Alexander II and Nicholas II (and the rest of the Romanovs); his delusions have a transformative effect, for reasons unknown, on his new doctor (Tarkovsky fave Oleg Yankovsky). The psychiatrist becomes convinced he's the last tsar, and we come share the characters' muddlement between what is the "past" and what is the "present," but the political ruefulness and the narrative point both seem half-baked. The filmmaker revisits the tsarist milieu with more determination in THE RIDER NAMED DEATH (2004; December 6 at 3:45 pm), which begins with a rather slovenly nod to the pre-WW1 underworld serial Les vampires and finishes on the same phrase from Revelation that gave its name to Elem Klimov's Belarussian death march Come and See. It's not a milieu we're over-acquainted with: 1905 Russia, when the various revolutionary forces and their radical terrorist arms were still gathering steam, busily bombing and assassinating officers, dukes, politicos, and diplomats.

Based on Boris Savinkov's semi-autobiographical novel — which was written in 1909, before the insurrectionary free-for-all came close to coalescing into something much more substantial — Shakhnazarov's film has in its grip a fascinating anti-hero. A cultured political murderer who fought against the anti-Socialist Bolsheviks after the Revolution, and who appears to have written his book while a fugitive from tsarist forces after escaping from custody in 1907, Savinkov must've been a scary, fascinating, white-hot live wire, that rare figure who might justify a full-on historical bio-pic. (Like the movie's hero, he fell to his death, in 1925, from the window of a Cheka interrogation room — jumped or pushed.) The movie doesn't quite rise to the possibilities, preferring a slack narrative line, an oddly underpopulated urban vibe, and an overall air of life-is-cheap detachment. Savinkov's stand-in is Georges (Andrei Papin), the whispery, gimlet-eyed leader of a motley band of Socialist Revolutionary assassins. In the 23-year run-up to 1917, some 17,000 Russian officials and bluebloods were blown up or shot down by rebel groups, but in The Rider Named Death, the killers are bumbling losers, failing again and again to take out a particular grand duke.

Movies from outer space Our new-found DVD-ness and cable-TV luxury notwithstanding, movies have always been a public medium, a spatial experience we share in the theater and a topical experience we share in the culture at large.

Review: Absurdistan Delicatessen sort of meets Borat in Veit Helmer's visually ripe, magic-realism-lite tale of life in a mythical Eastern European country that time forgot after the dissolution of the Soviet Bloc.

Kino pravda Because Mosfilm, the subject of the Museum of Fine Arts’ “Envisioning Russia” retrospective, was the Soviet state production studio, any cross-section of its history lays out the entirety of Soviet film history.

Latter day taint Fifteen years ago, Glenn Beck was a small-market DJ with a drinking problem, no friends, and bleak professional prospects. Today, he’s a Fox News superstar averaging 2.4 million viewers, an inexorably successful author, and the leader of a popular movement that condemns government in general and President Barack Obama in particular.

A Thousand Years of Good Prayers The relationship between fathers and daughters is complicated enough without being further strained by Mao’s Cultural Revolution.

Flashbacks: June 9, 2006 These selections, culled from our back files, were compiled by Chris Brook and Sam MacLaughlin.

Georgia on your mind? So much for the Republican Party’s long-standing boast that Ronald Reagan neutered the Soviet Union.

REVIEW: FAR FROM AFGHANISTAN | March 06, 2013 A contemporary mirror of 1967's multidirector lefty-agitprop masterpiece Far from Vietnam , this omnibus epic plumbs the American quagmire in Central Asia from the aesthetic viewpoints of five western filmmakers assembled by John Gianvito (who also contributes a segment), plus a cadre of Afghan locals called Afghan Voices.

AUTEUR LIMITS: THE FILMS OF STANLEY KUBRICK | January 30, 2013 There will never be another Stanley — cinema's greatest loner-demigod, the hermit CEO of hip public culture for decades running, the filmmaker-artiste everyone could obsess about even if they didn't know any other working director by name.

REVIEW: NOTHING BUT A MAN (1964) | January 08, 2013 Michael Roemer's modest, eloquent, New Wave-y micro-movie — made independently in 1964 — is essential viewing for its matter-of-fact look at an average black man's struggle for dignity in the Deep South in the early '60s.

REVIEW: THE DEEP BLUE SEA | March 29, 2012 Like a bad dream trapped in amber, Terence Davies's studied film adaptation of Terence Rattigan's famous 1952 play is both spectrally beautiful and frozen in self-regard.